The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (12 page)

Noreen burst out laughing. I took the key out of my pocket and walked right up to the door. It was the moment of truth. I held my breath, and looked back at the other two. Noreen was crossing her fingers at me in a conspicuous gesture of good luck, but Sawyer had his hands on his cheeks and he was pulling on his face in mock exasperation over the suspense.

I turned around, oriented the key in my hand, and thrust it slowly and dramatically toward the lock.

It was an antique pin-tumbler lock, the kind that took a large rod-style key. The keyhole was big enough to stick my little finger in.

“Well, that was anti-climactic,” said Sawyer.

Noreen stepped between us and pulled the doorhandle. The door opened with a soft ripping sound as the draft flap brushed across the threshold, and it sounded heavy with destiny, like Howard Carter opening Tut’s tomb. Or, at least, so I thought.

She stood aside, ushering us in with a sweeping gesture. “Age before beauty.”

We both gave her a look and stepped into the church.

We were at the end of a long hallway, carpeted with a lush red runner. Gold pinstripe wallpaper and dark wainscoting ran the length of the walk into darkness. Somewhere in the void, I could hear a vacuum cleaner rhythmically roaring in and out of earshot. Someone was talking, every so often. I stood there a moment listening before I realized it was someone singing.

Sawyer took the lead, bulling headlong into the depths of the tabernacle, rolling his feet as he walked, moving silently on the balls of his feet. Noreen and I followed suit. The grandiosity of the building made me feel like a secret Allied agent sneaking through an Axis headquarters.

We came to an open door with no light on inside. Sawyer peeked in, saw no one, and we continued. There were several other instances of this before we came to a junction where an orange drop-cord was snaking back and forth on the rug. We could hear the vacuum around the corner.

I made it to the intersection first and leaned out just enough to see a man in a pair of slate-gray coveralls dancing, having made his own Grace Kelly out of a decrepit Eureka. He was breathing heavily, white earbuds in his ears, and murmuring to himself as moved. “One two three four, one two three four....”

His back was to us. I beckoned to the other two and we twinkle-toed across the open space to the adjoining hallway. From there it was only a few steps to the nave itself. The coast was clear, so we walked right in and stood in front of the altar, looking up at the giant golden-brown effigy of the Christ Himself. I felt a vague dismay at the sight of such an agonized figure, pinned up there on a huge cross made of what looked like old railroad ties. What a condition to be immortalized in.

I heard a sigh and turned to see Sawyer pointing the camera up at the representation of the Son of God. “We found Him. Now what?”

“Now
you’re
It,” I said, examining the nave around me. I noticed a small gray metal box lying on a nearby pew. I tested the key on it and was relieved when it didn’t work, since it looked like a cash box and felt empty. Other than that, I didn’t see anything else to use the key on.

Noreen broke off and went to the other side of the room, strolling casually through the darkness under an overhanging part of the far flank wall. I could see the shadowy shapes of hymnal shelves and paintings there. Sawyer went to the opposite side, where I could just make out his blue sweater and pale face against the brown-black. I heard a clatter as he kicked something and swore to himself.

Since there was nothing in the middle of the room to inspect, I went straight to the narthex, where two huge wooden doors served as the front entrance to Walker Memorial. Smaller doors to either side led into areas flanking this small space.

I chose the one to the right and tried the key on it. It didn’t fit, but when I turned the knob the door opened and I was bathed in a soft light from above.

I leaned inside and saw a very steep staircase leading through a hole in the ceiling. Closing the door behind me, I climbed it and found myself in another, smaller space. A ladder in front of me led through another hole in the ceiling full of daylight.

At the top of that I pulled myself up out of the hole and discovered that I’d climbed into the apex of the bell tower. A pigeon was startled at my presence and flapped squealing into the canopy.

I surveyed the town of Blackfield around me, watching traffic motor by through the branches of the oaks and maples that dotted the grass median running up and down Main Street. Of course, there was a bell here, a grand and thunderous-looking thing that had obviously not been rung in many years. Instead, there was a pair of loudspeakers bolted to a nearby wall, the crotch between the two horns crammed with a handful of pine-straw and hair.

Finding nothing of interest, I began the dirty and laborious descent back down the rickety ladder and the nearly vertical staircase. As I made to open the door, I could hear talking from the other side.

I strained to hear it over the noise of the traffic on the street. “—Very nice to receive visitors here—as always, of course—but I must say that this is awfully late in the day to crave salvation. To what do I owe the honor of this unexpected visit?” said a voice I recognized to be that of Moses Atterberry.

Sawyer: “After hearing you talk about E. R. Brigham growing up here at the church, we wanted to see it for ourselves. Maybe absorb a little of one of the places that must have inspired Mr. Brigham so much.”

Noreen: “Yes! This church reminds me so much of one of the castles in his books. A man named Seymour lived in an old monastery damaged by the war. He raised crocodiles in the moat and let the villain in book six feed political prisoners to them in exchange for letting him stay there.”

Atterberry: “That’s certainly a macabre reason to visit a church. But I’m glad you’re here anyway.”

I couldn’t hear the awkward shrug from Sawyer, but I could see it, as by then I’d opened the door just a crack. They were standing and talking in a loose triangle just in front of the altar, Noreen and Atterberry facing away from me. I knew Sawyer couldn’t see me behind the door, so I came out of the bell tower anteroom and waved at him, creeping across the narthex to the other side. He only vaguely acknowledged me, averting his eyes from the movement.

Luckily, Atterberry didn’t notice, and he nearly did, when I almost ran into a candelabrum because I wasn’t watching where I was going. I pulled the key out, boogied over to the other door like a ninja running the last five yards of a game-winning touchdown, stuck the key right into the old deadbolt lock, and turned it.

There was a faint
click!,
and my heart leapt in shock and fear.

I peered over the top of the rearmost pew to see if anyone was looking at me. They weren’t, so I turned and opened the door only to find myself face to face with a most opaque darkness. I literally could not see
anything
beyond the door’s threshold.

So, I walked right in and eased the door shut behind me.

_______

The musty void I’d hurled myself into threatened to consume me with dread. I knew only that I was standing on a staircase because the floor was extremely uneven. If I hadn’t been so nimble, I might have taken another tumble down the stairs, and those never end well.

I rotated slowly, feeling my way with my toes, and took my cellphone out, shining it all around me, illuminating my surroundings with an eerie blue glow. The walls of the stairwell were simple red bricks, dusty and draped with buntings of cobwebs that looked like black cotton candy. The stairs were ancient-looking and wooden, jostling side by side like an old man’s teeth.

Several steps down, they veered to the left and continued downward into a space under the nave. I followed them, creeping sideways, ready to charge back up the stairs at the first provocation.

I descended into some sort of a dirt-floored cellar. Tiny cockroaches scattered from the glow of my cellphone. I looked up at the ceiling just a foot above my head, and crouched out of fear. A few fat spiders lurked in the spaces between the joists of the narthex floor overhead.

I duck-walked away from them and saw an opening in the dirt wall to my right that continued deeper into the floor under the nave. I gazed inside. My phone’s sorry shine did nothing to reveal anything beyond a ten-foot length of narrow tunnel.

Abandoning my senses, I ventured inside and stoop-walked down the length of it.

I came out into a roughly-hewn room about twenty feet square. The walls of it were a smooth, unbroken stone comprised of what seemed to be the same material making up the bricks that were used to build the church. Above me, I could hear Atterberry and my friends talking to each other, their words muffled by a layer of carpet, probably some insulating layer, and wood flooring.

I did some quick mental math and decided that I was directly underneath the altar and the big brown Jesus. The walls to my left and right were broken into bold white stripes. I approached them and found that there were wide swaths of canvas hanging from the walls like tapestries, with unfamiliar words and phrases scrawled on them in black.

I noticed something jutting out of the stone wall over the hole I’d entered from, so I stood up and got close with my phone. Someone had hammered what appeared to be a railroad spike into the wall’s surface near the ceiling, leaving only about an inch protruding. It angled downward almost imperceptibly, as if having supported a great weight for many years.

The dialogue overhead tapered into silence, and I heard footsteps making their way off to my right. A door closed.

Something moved behind me.

I spun and thrust the cellphone out, flooding a nearby corner with light. My relief at not finding anything there immediately turned to anxiousness, and I made my way back to the staircase, hunched over and loping like Quasimodo. On the way through the first chamber, I recoiled at the sight of the spiders again and jogged up the stairs.

When I eased the door open, I was still holding the glowing cellphone to my chest, trying to still my heart, and as a result, my face was illuminated from beneath. I scared the hell out of Noreen, who just happened to be standing next to me.

She punched me in the arm. “Where did you go? Did you find anything?”

“The key works on this door,” I said, excited. “I opened it and went down some stairs into some kinda burrow with a big nail in the wall. I think something used to hang there.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Sawyer, shutting the camera’s viewfinder screen. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I got a huge case of the heebie jeebies.”

_______

It was raining in earnest again, and the water was beginning to accumulate in the culverts by the road, making for large puddles of standing water that roostered out from the car’s flanks. I took Sawyer and Noreen back to the Hampton Inn on the other side of town where they were staying and I stayed long enough to see her off.

“It’s too bad you can’t stay a couple more days,” said Sawyer, leaning into her car window. “Gonna miss ya.”

“You’ve got my email address?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“You’ve got my cellphone number?”

“Yep.”

She pulled him inside the car by his collar and gave him a long, sensuous kiss. They broke off and Sawyer just looked at her, dazed, still stooped over with his head in the car.

“We’ll see each other again,” Noreen said, smiling. She turned the engine over, putting on her seatbelt, then put the car in gear and eased away. Sawyer watched her dwindle away to nothing. I just stood there, too, letting the moment linger. Life is a series of moments like this. They are what make us who we are. I’d be a rude friend to take this one away.

Once the spell had worn off and the girl was gone, he turned to me and sighed, giving me unspoken permission to intrude. “I know, buddy,” I said, and tossed my arm around his shoulders as we walked away, giving him a commiserating pat on the back.

I treated him to dinner at a mom-and-pop seafood joint down the street from the Hampton. The sky was still a river of nickels, but the rain had ceased for the time being. The water standing on the street turned the headlights of every passing car into long-legged neon spiders that hissed and crashed past the windows.

I panned Sawyer’s camera away from the pale indigo evening and put it on the table. “So what do you do back home?”

“I used to think I was going to be a computer programmer, but a career in tech support didn’t quite agree with my sense of patience, so I’m going to film school at Full Sail.”

“Really? That explains the camera. I wondered what you were up to. I knew it wasn’t just vacation video.”

“Yeah. I’m making a sort of YouTube documentary about E. R. Brigham, but things are getting a little more...interesting, I guess you could say.”

“I guess you could say that.”

“I’m thinking of doing something a little more cinematic with it. So what are
you
doing back home?” asked Sawyer. “I haven’t seen much about you since you enlisted in the Army.”

“I used my G.I. Bill to go to art school. Right now when I get home I’ll be doing freelance art, and working for a little design shop in Kentucky that does things like T-shirts for ball teams, promotional office equipment for companies, coffee mugs, hats, that kind of thing.”